How to Use Software Inventory & Automated Patch Management

What is Software Inventory?

Every agent reports its installed software back to Plenix, building a central catalogue you can search across the whole fleet. When a version is affected by a known vulnerability, Plenix flags it so you can remediate before it becomes an incident.

Viewing the software catalogue

1. Go to Monitoring → Software Inventory
2. Search or filter by application name, version, or device
3. Click any application to see which devices have it installed and which versions

Spotting vulnerabilities

• Applications with a known critical version are flagged with a VULN badge
• Filter by Vulnerable only to see just the software that needs attention
• Each flagged item links to the affected devices

Patching a device

Manual patch

1. Open Monitoring → Patch Status (or the device's detail page)
2. Review the list of available patches
3. Select the patches and click Deploy
4. The status moves Pending → Deploying → Patched

Automated patch policies

Set up a policy once and let Plenix patch continuously:

1. Go to RMM → Policies (or Monitoring → Patch Management)
2. Create a Patch Policy — for example:
   • Trigger: Critical CVE detected
   • Scope: a device group (e.g. "All Workstations")
   • Window: deploy within 24 hours, during a maintenance window
3. Save. When matching software is found, the policy deploys the patch across the group automatically.

Compliance reporting

• Monitoring → Reports shows patch compliance per device group
• Schedule the report to email a client automatically after each patch cycle

Tips

• Use device groups to apply different patch cadences to servers vs workstations
• Combine with RMM automations to restart a service or notify a technician after a patch installs

Where to go next

• Understand the whole module → How Device Monitoring Works
• Next in this module → How to Manage IP Addresses (IPAM)
• How a Device Problem Becomes a Fix
• How the Cross-Platform Agent Works (Windows, macOS & Linux)
• See where this fits in the bigger picture → How a Device Problem Becomes a Fix